Friday, February 5, 2016

1984 Required Reading: Support Silver Senator 2016 Here Now

"Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world looked
cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and
torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a
harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters
that were plastered everywhere."

The year is 1984; the scene is London, largest population center of Airstrip One.

Airstrip One is part of the vast political entity Oceania, which is
eternally at war with one of two other vast entities, Eurasia and
Eastasia.

At any moment, depending upon current alignments, all existing
records show either that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia
and allied with Eastasia, or that it has always been at war with
Eastasia and allied with Eurasia.

Winston Smith knows this, because his
work at the Ministry of Truth involves the constant "correction" of such
records.

"'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the
future: who controls the present controls the past.'"

In a grim
city and a terrifying country, where Big Brother is always Watching You
and the Thought Police can practically read your mind, Winston is a man
in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions.

He knows the Party's official image of the world is a fluid fiction.

He
knows the Party controls the people by feeding them lies and narrowing
their imaginations through a process of bewilderment and brutalization
that alienates each individual from his fellows and deprives him of
every liberating human pursuit from reasoned inquiry to sexual passion.

Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a
secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to
the destruction of the Party.

Together with his beloved Julia, he
hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.

Newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime--in 1984,
George Orwell created a whole vocabulary of words concerning
totalitarian control that have since passed into our common vocabulary.

More importantly, he portrayed a chillingly credible dystopia.

In
our deeply anxious world, the seeds of unthinking conformity are
everywhere in evidence; and Big Brother is always looking for his
chance.

Review

Novel by George Orwell, published in 1949 as a warning about the
menaces of totalitarianism.

The novel is set in an imaginary future
world dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police
states.

The book's hero, Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary in
one of these states.

His longing for truth and decency leads him to
secretly rebel against the government.

Smith has a love affair with a
like-minded woman, but they are both arrested by the Thought Police.

The
ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended
not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out
his independent mental existence and his spiritual dignity.

Orwell's
warning of the dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his
contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book's title and
many of its coinages, such as NEWSPEAK, became bywords for modern
political abuses.